The summers of 1798 and 1799 were largely spent in North Wales. Here he found exactly the material that chimed in with the mood of sternness and gloom he wished to express: steep, convulsive mountains, wild valleys and broken passes, the bare skeletonlike ribs of broken ships aground on lonely estuaries, massive ruins of huge castles perched on inaccessible crags, gnawed to the bone as it were by the wind and rain and remorseless Time. His mental grasp has clearly broadened. He no longer sees buildings as isolated objects, but they now fall into their places as incidents in the wide panorama of the country. Nothing is now drawn for itself; the trees are emanations from the ground, the dry land and the waters are kinsmen, the stones in the foreground are parts of the distant mountains, and the mountains huge elder brothers of the pebbles by the river-side. The bubbling waters are but clouds made captive, the clouds the freed souls of the brooks, the trees the organ of their transformation; and castles like Conway, standing with their roots plunged deep into their rocky foundations, seem but rocks raised to a higher power. The distinction between human art and physical nature is everywhere broken down. The spirit of life in nature is identified with the volitions and passions of the artist’s own soul: he has become sensible ‘to the moods of time and season, to the moral power, the affections and the spirit of the place.’[12] This state of mind is closely akin to the mood in which the myths of the Old World had taken shape. Small wonder, then, if the broken and withered branches of a stricken tree writhing among vigorously shooting brushwood should suggest to Turner’s mobile fancy the idea of snakes and dragons. The sketch here reproduced (Plate XIII.) strikes me as probably the origin of the picture of ‘Jason’ which was exhibited in 1802.